Sunset Park

Postcards From the Edge of Sunset Park: An apartment building called The Hamilton replaces a roller rink

Eye On Real Estate

March 8, 2017 By Lore Croghan Brooklyn Daily Eagle
This apartment building is The Hamilton, where a roller rink once stood. Eagle photos by Lore Croghan
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There’s always something special to see in Sunset Park.

As a preservation-obsessed Brooklynite, we’ve devoted photo features to the landmark-worthy blocks of this intriguing neighborhood.

As a writer fascinated by immigrant cultures, we’ve devoted features to Fifth Avenue’s Hispanic food businesses and Eighth Avenue’s entrepreneurs from Hong Kong and China’s Fujian Province.

As a believer in small businesses as big sources of job creation, we’ve devoted yet other features to Industry City, Sunset Park’s mecca for tech and manufacturing companies.  

Now, we offer Postcards From the Edge. (Yes, we’re borrowing that phrase from the title of the late, great Carrie Fisher’s novel.) Namely the edge of Sunset Park. There are such interesting things out on the edges of the neighborhood.

* * *

Once upon a time, a roller rink stood on the corner of Fort Hamilton Parkway and 60th Street.

Now a handsome rental-apartment building called The Hamilton has taken its place.

Those of us who don’t live in this area on the borders of Sunset Park and Borough Park know about the rink from lease documents in city Finance Department records.

There’s a 1980 memorandum of lease between United Skates of America Inc. and Rogers Ford Inc., which at that time owned the building at 6002 Fort Hamilton Parkway. Plus there’s a 1982 consent and release document that indicates the lease was assigned to New Skates Inc.

More recently, a 2005 city zoning variance notice notes that there had been a roller rink on the property’s first floor, but at that time, the rink had been closed for more than a decade.

The document also says the second and third floors of that building had been occupied by “commercial and manufacturing uses” but were by that time largely vacant.

That zoning variance allowed the industrial building to be converted to residential use. The property owner at that time was 6002 Fort Hamilton Parkway Partnership with Michael Mendlovic as partner, Finance Department records indicate.

In 2015, ownership of the property was transferred to Fort Hamilton Group LLC with Michael Mendlovic as member, those records show.

Halcyon Management Group was the co-developer of the recently completed residential conversion project.

The Hamilton, which is five stories tall, has 92 market-rate apartments and uses 968 60th St. as its address.

Tenants started settling into The Hamilton in October. They moved from Lower Manhattan’s Financial District, Williamsburg and Brownstone Brooklyn neighborhoods including Brooklyn Heights and Carroll Gardens, Linda Alexander, the developers’ spokeswoman, told us during a recent visit to the property.

Asking rents start at $1,800 for studios and $2,300 for one-bedroom apartments, she said.

The first tenants at The Hamilton had to deal with an unexpected problem. National Grid didn’t hook up gas lines before they moved in. For three weeks, their gas stoves didn’t work.

The landlord comped their first month’s rent and provided hot plates for cooking.  

The situation had a negative impact on The Hamilton’s leasing campaign.

By the end of the year, leasing volume picked up again — and now nearly 70 percent of the units are rented, Alexander said.

Other apartment buildings in Halcyon Management Group’s portfolio are 101 Bedford, which is in Williamsburg, and the Plex, which is in Crown Heights.

 

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